Dmitry Kiselev at the launch of Sputnik, as seen on Russian NTV
But it is also coming under increased scrutiny over its lack
of editorial balance and accusations that it is deliberately using
disinformation to counter and divide the West.
In a spanking new press centre in Moscow on 10 November,
controversial TV news anchor Dmitry Kiselev, who is also head of the
Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) news agency, unveiled Sputnik - the
Kremlin's latest foray into the international news arena.
With its planned network of media hubs in 30 cities, Sputnik
is the new brand for the radio station Voice of Russia and the
foreign-language operations of the RIA Novosti news service, which were
taken over by Rossiya Segodnya when it was launched last December.
Propaganda
Kiselev said the new project was aimed at a global audience
"tired of aggressive propaganda promoting a unipolar world and who want a
different perspective".
But with his own relentless denunciation of the West and
demonisation of Ukrainians as fascists on state TV, there can hardly be a
more practised purveyor of "aggressive propaganda" than Kiselev
himself.
Sputnik's owners are planning a network of media hubs in 30 cities
The Sputnik launch came less than a fortnight after the
Kremlin's international TV channel RT (formerly known as Russia Today)
unveiled a dedicated news service for viewers in the UK. Editor-in-Chief
Margarita Simonyan (who holds the same position at Rossiya Segodnya)
said that RT UK would seek to "promote debate and new ways of thinking
about British issues".
RT's funding is set to rise in 2015 to over $330m (£210m;
€264m). It is said to be planning to add French and German operations to
its existing services in English, Spanish and Arabic.
But RT UK's debut was greeted with a barrage of criticism in
the British press. Writing in the Observer, Nick Cohen accused the
channel of spreading conspiracy theories and being a "prostitution of
journalism". Meanwhile, in The Times, Oliver Kamm called on broadcast
regulator Ofcom to act against this "den of deceivers".
'Weaponisation'
Oliver Kamm did not have long to wait. On 10 November, Ofcom
found RT guilty of violating the broadcasting code's "due impartiality"
rules in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis in early March. It rejected
RT's contention that as a station that challenges the "established" view
in the UK it was somehow exempt from the normal broadcast requirements.
In view of past violations, it put the channel on notice that
future breaches may result in a "statutory sanction", which could
include fines, or even the suspension or revocation of RT's broadcast
licence.
For President Putin, RT is spearheading Russia's bid to
challenge the "Anglo-Saxon monopoly" on global news. But, according to a
recent report by US journalist Michael Weiss and UK-based writer and TV
producer Peter Pomerantsev, it is part of a strategy of disinformation
aimed at countering and dividing the West.
Entitled "The menace of unreality: How the Kremlin weaponises information, culture and money", the report
was produced under the aegis of the US-based Institute of Modern Russia
(IMR), which is part-funded by members of the family of former oil
tycoon and Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky..
RT's coverage of the Ukraine crisis has seen it investigated by Ofcom
Adapting techniques inherited from the old KGB, say the
authors, RT makes extensive use of conspiracy theories that serve to
undermine a "reality-based discourse". This, they argue, then creates
the conditions in which the Kremlin can advance its own disinformation
to "confuse situations at critical junctures".
They give as examples a spurious RT report about Jews fleeing
Ukraine over anti-Semitism, equally bogus insinuations that a US think
tank was advising Ukrainian President Poroshenko to carry out ethnic
cleansing, and the spreading of conspiracy theories concerning the
downing of Malaysian airliner MH17 over east Ukraine in July.
According to Weiss and Pomerantsev, this kind of media
manipulation amounts to a "weaponisation of information", a phrase also
used in relation to Russia by Mark Galeotti, a professor of global
affairs at New York University.
'Information war'
But Ms Simonyan insists that RT is not very different from
other major news broadcasters. Responding to the Ofcom ruling, she said
the BBC was also guilty of "bias" in its reporting of Ukraine, as well
as its coverage of other issues.
In a statement
posted on RT's website, she said other broadcasters would also have to
change the way they operate, "if double standards are to be avoided".
Weiss and Pomerantsev, meanwhile, came under fire in an
anonymous article on the pro-Kremlin English-language website Russia
Insider. Part political critique, part personalised attack, the article
accuses them of being members of a "Russophobic hack pack" that also
includes Edward Lucas of The Economist and US journalist Anne Applebaum.
Ordinary Russians appear to hold similar views. A poll
published on 12 November by the independent Levada Centre indicated that
88% of the population believe the USA and other Western countries are
waging an information war against Russia. Just 4% dissented from this
view.
BBC Monitoring reports and analyses news from TV, radio, web and print media around the world. You can follow BBC Monitoring on Twitter and Facebook.